A Twitter tool for journalists, for professionals, and for the enterprise
TW3 Business database for Twitter
TW3 Business keeps a backup of your tweets on your own computer
Los Angeles. 2010 September 2 Thursday
Dear Media Professional,
“TW3 Business” was developed so that Cinema Minima’s reporters and editors could keep on tweetin’ whether twitter.com was online, or offline. . . . TW3 Business lets us compose tweets offline, and schedule them for posting online later.
→ TW3 Business can post even when the Twitter API is not working.
Plus, we wanted to be able to add information about the context, like the real name (not just the @username) of the person to whom a tweet is addressed, a subject/keyword, and even a few remarks about the story to which the tweet refers. TW3 Business has room for those.
Some tweets get posted repeatedly from time to time — like a radio program’s station identification
announcements — TW3 Business lets you flag tweets as evergreen
so that they can be recalled and reposted whenever needed.
Besides providing a rich editing tool for Twitter, TW3 Business works as a database, an archive, and a backup for our Twitter messages.
We needed to be able to respond to casual inquiries such as, Let’s see our Correspondent’s tweets from last year, when she was at Sundance. . . .
The TW3 Business database is a complete, searchable, sortable archive of all the posts made to Twitter since we started posting there in 2007.
—— Austin Burbridge, Editor-in-Chief,
Cinema Minima News for Movie Makers Worldwide
P. S. This version of TW3 Business includes features for professionals, including Client and Account fields for billing; and Publication Date, Deadline, and Kill Date fields for time-sensitive items, such as press releases.
P. P. S. And -- for the boss -- Activity Reports, by day, and by client.
TW3 Business keeps your tweets secure and at your fingertips
TW3 Business is a database for your Twitter messages (tweets). It installs on your own computer. It stores your Twitter posts on your computer. You will have a backup of your tweets with TW3 Business.
Compose your tweet and post it from TW3 Business’s rich editor. A generously-sized edit field displays your words in big type, so that you won't have to squint to see what you’re doing. A Scratchpad onto which you can drag and drop clippings from blogs, articles, etc. Wordcount. A URL shortener.
Add keywords, annotations, and remarks, so that next year — after the context would have been forgotten — you can go back and see what you meant when you posted. And you can go back — because TW3 Business is a database, too, it keeps everything for you, ready to go.
Journalists, writers, editors, publicists, and professionals who need to save, annotate, search, list, or print their Twitter posts will appreciate TW3 Business’s rich feature set:
- Review posts, or create and edit new ones, whether you are connected to the Internet, or working offline.
- Mark frequently-repeated tweets as “evergreen” to keep them handy for repost.
- Save and insert frequently-used “boilerplate” text or links.
- Find tweets by criteria you choose — including date, RT (retweet), #hashtag, or @username (replies) — and sort them as you wish.
- Print lists.
A professional’s tool. If you use Twitter casually, then TW3 Business’s composition tools, database, meta data, sorting, and printing may be more than you need. But if you must Twitter as part of your job — or you do it for a living — TW3 Business will make your work easier.
Freelance-friendly client and account info. If you post items for your clients, TW3 Business’s Client, Account, Publication Date, Deadline, and Kill Date fields will make it easy to account for your work, and to whom it should be billed.
Developed for journalists, by journalists. Custom versions of the program have been in use since 2007 by the editorial staff of Cinema Minima News for Movie Makers. TW3 Business has been developed specifically for use by journalists and professionals.
A tweet answers “What?” TW3 Business answers “Who?” “Where?” “When?” and “Why?” A reporter can use TW3 Business to register the significance of a tweet by adding notes — for future reference, and also as pointers to longer pieces such as articles or blog posts.
TW3 Business gives you room to write. Even Hemingway’s first drafts were not Twitter-terse. You may start by taking more than 140 characters to express what you want to tweet. TW3 Business’s Edit Post field expands to hold your complete thought — after that, you can edit it down to Twitter-length.
The TW3 Business “Remarks” Tab provides a generously-sized tablet for extended remarks. You can even record your remarks as audio!
Off Twitter’s cloud — onto your own desktop. TW3 Business keeps copies of your tweets in a database, in your own personal computer. Twitter may go offline from time to time; but the tweets you worked hard to create, will be stored securely, in your own computer.
Backup. Put your TW3 Business data files onto a CD-ROM or a DVD for safe-keeping. Export your stories into text files and email them; you can even print them out for hardcopy storage!
Interface
Many reporters prefer small laptops as their primary computers. TW3’s interface is compact. These screenshots were taken from a 12-inch|30-centimeter PowerBook.
The Benefits of TW3 Business
- Feature
- Benefit
- Installs on your own computer.
- No downtime — Twitter may go down from time to time. TW3 Business — and its database of your tweets — is always available on your own computer.
- TW3 works offline
- Write now — publish later. You may not always be connected to the Internet. TW3 Business lets you compose and edit tweets for posting later.
- Local Storage
- Keep a working copy of your tweets on your own computer.
- Local Backup
- Backup your tweets onto secure media for safe-keeping. Burn them onto a CD, or DVD; or copy them onto a USB drive.
Database
- Feature
- Benefit
- Search
- Find the tweets you’re looking for, fast — by word; by date; by subject; by @reply; by link (URL); or by any other criteria you choose.
- Pre-loaded searches
- Pull down the Go menu to find today’s tweets, or only past tweets, or the tweets you have scheduled for posting in the future. Find #hashmark URLs; find re-tweets; find @replys.
- Subject and Keyword Meta-Data
- Search and organize your posts by Subject and Keyword descriptions.
- Client, Account, Publication Date, Deadline, and Kill Date Fields
- If you post items for your clients, these Client, Account, Publication Date, Deadline, and Kill Date fields will make it easy to account for your work, and to whom it should be billed.
- View Tweets As List
- Inspect your tweets as a list. You can scroll from first post to last, or jump to any post.
- Sort Tweets
- Sorting arranges your tweets in the order which makes sense to you — by date; by subject; by @reply; by Retweet; alphabetical; etc.
- Five User-Defined Data Fields
- Store information about your stories in categories which best suit your own work: keywords, subject, sources, etc.
- Printing
- Print your tweets, organized in the way you want them.
- Built-in Filemaker Pro database engine
- Easy to use. Filemaker Pro is the easiest-to-use database tool. If you can point-and-click, you already know how to use TW3.
TW3 comes with its own, runtime version of the Filemaker Pro database engine built-in. A separate copy of the Filemaker Pro application is not needed to run TW3.
Content
- Feature
- Benefit
- “Evergreen” posts
- Mark frequently-repeated tweets as “Evergreen” to keep them handy for reposting.
- Storage of links (URLs)
- Both original long links (URLs) and shortened links are stored in separate fields. They can be searched, sorted, and grouped like any other element in TW3’s database.
Composition
- Feature
- Benefit
- Post composition area with big type and big margins
- You won't have to squint to see what you're doing!
- Scratch pad
- Paste scraps from other applications, and other tweets. Jot notes or addresses. What you put in the scratch pad will be available throughout the database.
- Automatic text cleanup
- Don't worry about invisible characters wasting space in your 140 character message. TW3 Business automatically removes extra space characters and carriage returns. To make sure your message will display correctly in most environments TW3 Business straightens quotation marks — from “this” to "this" — and changes en-dashes – and em-dashes — to hyphens.
- Written remarks about each post
- Take as much space as needed to explain the significance and context of the story you're tweeting.
- Record remarks as audio
- In a hurry — or just want to keep it fresh? Record your notes as audio.
- Mark posts
- Mark posts you want to retrieve later. You can arbitrarily mark stories, then Find marked records.
Publication/Posting
- Feature
- Benefit
- Browser-based posting
- See the context of your post in real time.
- Drag-and-Drop posting
- Eliminate “accidental” or inadvertent posts. When your business account publishes to thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of followers (or more), casually hitting a “Send” button before your tweet is ready, can be more than merely embarrassing to you, or confusing to your followers — It can have unintended or even costly consequences for your business. TW3’s Drag-and-Drop posting method helps to make sure that you post only what you really intend to be published.
Sharing
- Feature
- Benefit
- Copy Post to clipboard
- You can copy a post, then paste it into another application, such as a blog or a word processor.
- Export
- Save the records in your database as text files, spreadsheets, or in fomats for import into another database.
- Import
- Have you been keeping a list of tweets already? Import it into TW3.
System Requirements
Macintosh OS X version 10.4.8 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard).
TW3 Business requires at least one hundred megabytes of hard disk space on installation.
Although an Internet connection would be needed to post to Twitter, with TW3 Business you can compose and edit tweets while you are offline.
TW3 comes with its own, runtime version of the magnificent Filemaker Pro database engine built-in. A separate copy of the Filemaker Pro application is not needed.
License
One user, three computers. The TW3 Business license is for one user, for installation on an office computer, a portable computer, and a home computer.
Download
Your purchase of TW3 Business supports Cinema Minima News for Movie Makers Worldwide, and its initiatives, Far From Hollywood, and Sustainable Cinema. Cinema Minima Correspondents report from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and India. Far From Hollywood arranges regular encounters among filmmakers and producers around the world. Sustainable Cinema promotes the development of local filmmaking for local audiences.
Copyright ©2007–2010 TW3 Business. All rights reserved. “TW3 Business” is its trademark. “Cinema Minima” and “News for Movie Makers” are trademarks of Cinema Minima. “Filemaker Pro” is a trademark of Filemaker, Inc. “Twitter” is a trademark of Twitter, Inc. TW3 Business was developed independently of Twitter. There is no relationship between Twitter and the developer of TW3.
Contact <TW3Business@cinemaminima.com>.
A Great, Alternative Tool. Dave Winer’s TwitterCalendar Tool maintains an archive of your Twitter posts and those of the people you follow. It stores the tweets online (in a “data cloud”) or in a local folder. It works on Windows or Macintosh. Based on the great, elegant OMPL Editor, TW3 Business recommends it as a superb, free alternative.
Dave Winer’s ongoing, constructive critique of Twitter — what is, and what could be — is a pole star.